Raymond Chandler used to say that whenever he got stuck writing a
novel he would get going again by having a character come through
the door with a gun in hand. Reading the opening pages of Nadine
Gordimer’s new novel with its account of a sensational murder, one
might wonder whether South Africa’s 1991 Nobel laureate, faced
with the end of apartheid and the consequent lack of a subject, was
operating according to Chandler’s principle. The House Gun, however,
indicates not so much the lack of a subject as a new way of
looking at an old subject facing new circumstances – the old subject
being the psychological and material effects of white racism on
whites, the new circumstances being those of post-apartheid South
Africa. Moreover, the apparent narrowing of focus from the macropolitics
of Gordimer’s three most recent preceding novels, None to
Accompany Me (1994), My Son’s Story (1990), and A Sport of Nature
(1987), to the micro-politics of The House Gun suggests that we can
read South Africa’s transition to full democracy as a paradigmatic
change from a modern to a postmodern condition. Gordimer’s post-
1994 publications, and The House Gun in particular, lend themselves
to being read as illustrative of two of Michel Foucault’s central
insights: the ubiquity of power, and the consequent idea that given
that ubiquity, care of one’s self (‘souci de soi’) becomes a new kind
of political obligation.
